Two Years at Sea is a quiet portrait of Jake Williams, who lives alone in the forests of Aberdeenshire, far removed from the rhythms of modern life. Shot on hand-processed 16 mm, the film dwells on his everyday existence—cooking simple meals, repairing tools, wandering through dense woodland, lying back in still contemplation. Work and rest, silence and weather, light and darkness.
The film inhabits Jake’s world as it slowly reveals itself: a caravan suspended among the trees, a bonfire flickering against the night, the long winter giving way to brief summer sun. In these images, solitude becomes less an absence than a condition full of texture, humour, and quiet intensity.
A decade later, Ben Rivers returned to Jake’s world in Bogancloch, also screening at MIRAGE. Seen together, the two films create a diptych of endurance and change—portraits of a man, a place, and the shifting qualities of time itself.
